Pour un « troisième front » : luttes féministes et syndicales face au tournant néolibéral québécois

Camille Robert

Les années 1980 sont généralement perçues comme un moment de recul dans l’histoire du syndicalisme, notamment à la suite d’offensives des gouvernements contre les syndicats du secteur public. Malgré un contexte défavorable, cette période a été déterminante pour l’affirmation d’une militance féminine et féministe au sein des structures syndicales. L’historiographie du syndicalisme québécois s’est toutefois peu intéressée aux mobilisations des femmes à l’intérieur des centrales, ainsi qu’aux dimensions féministes des luttes dans le secteur public. En m’appuyant sur des entrevues menées avec des travailleuses et sur les archives produites par les comités syndicaux de condition féminine, je souhaite poser quelques jalons afin de mettre en lumière la militance de ces syndiquées dans le contexte du tournant néolibéral québécois.

J’avancerai également que l’essor des luttes féministes dans le mouvement syndical mériterait d’être reconnu comme véritable « troisième front » qui s’est développé de manière distincte du « deuxième front ». Ce dernier s’était déployé à l’appel de la CSN (1968) autour de luttes sociopolitiques, mais en accordant une place relativement marginale aux femmes et à leurs revendications. Les contributions spécifiques des militantes syndicales, dans les années 1970 et 1980, reste largement à reconnaître. Par leur engagement, elles ont jeté les bases de plusieurs réformes à portée sociale – équité salariale, congés parentaux, garderies – qui toucheront l’ensemble des travailleuses au cours des décennies suivantes.

Show us how to do it”: Home Care Workers & Organized Labor’s Revival Despite Reagan

Mia Michael

“I got fun out of going out there and fighting for it,” Geneva Evans informed the Boston Globe in  1987. “We got dignity and respect.” Employed in Massachusetts’ home care system since 1974, Evans  performed essential yet undervalued labor. Reduced services and hours jeopardized elderly clients as  meager pay and inconsistent schedules flung workers into poverty’s realm. Evans, a middle-aged  Black woman and home care paraprofessional, wasn’t a typical union member. Even so, she joined  the rising tide of low-wage Americans unionizing to demand economic justice.

Unionism wasn’t an obvious solution to home care aides’ plight during the 1980s. Cast as a  period of unionism’s weakness, dormancy, and decline, low-wage workers also made it a time of  hope and agitation, of revival rather than repose. As part of United Labor Unions (ULU) Local  1475, hundreds of home care aides including Geneva Evans mobilized around metropolitan Boston  to improve their degraded working conditions. As one local pro-labor publication concluded: “The  strategy of organizing simultaneously at the workplace, in the community and in the legislature is one that more and  more unions will have to adopt….ULU Local 1475 is helping to show us how to do it.” 

Ultimately, my paper explains the emergence of a powerful and unexpected form of labor  organizing – the new labor activism – that is community-based, multi-issue oriented, and propelled by  working-class women of color. Today, amidst spiraling economic inequality and political gridlock,  let’s rethink how we characterize recent labor history and learn from their struggles.

We Can Do It Ourselves”: A Feminist Union and the Fight For Maternity Leave

Thomas MacMillan

In 1970s British Columbia, a number of feminist workers self-organized their workplaces, most prominently clerical and other support staff workers at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. They were inspired by the successes of the resurgent women’s movement, distressed by the lack of interest in them by male-led unions, and aided by progressive Canadian breakaway unions. The largest of these unions, the independent Association of University and College Employees (AUCE), worked to eliminate sex-based discrimination in the workplace in two major ways. First, it sought to increase wages for the lowest paid members through flat “across the board” raises in each contract. It also negotiated a landmark maternity leave provision which took advantage of the newly-established maternity leave provisions passed by the federal government’s Unemployment Insurance system. AUCE negotiated a unique “top-up” clause which eliminated financial penalties for taking maternity leave. This was the first fully paid maternity leave provision in Canada and, in so doing, challenged existing unions to be more inclusive and democratic, especially regarding women’s roles in organized labour. After successfully defending paid maternity leave against the federal government, the plan was then adopted by major unions, including the Front commun in Quebec and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.